Readers familiar with my writing for The New Republic may recall that I have a considerablesoftspot for the Pixar oeuvre. So I was curious to read the recent Wired cover piece,
published in advance of this week's release of Toy Story 3, asking how
it is that while (pace William Goldman) "Nobody in Hollywood knows
anything ... Pixar seems to know everything."

The article
nails one of Pixar's signal strengths: Rather than relying on a
revolving set of freelance talents, it has assembled a longtime staff
of creative regulars (people such as John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton,
Pete Docter, Brad Bird, and others) who trust one another well enough
to endure an environment of constant, if collegial, self-critique. The
piece also has some remarkable details about Pixar's technical process,
such as the following:

Each character is defined by up
to 1,000 avars--points of possible movement--that the animators can
manipulate like strings on a puppet. Each morning, the team gathers to
review the second or two of film from the day before. The frames are
ripped apart as the team searches for ways to make the sequences more
expressive...

The average frame (a movie has 24 frames
per second) takes about seven hours to render, although some can take
nearly 39 hours of computing time. The Pixar building houses two
massive render farms, each of which contains hundreds of servers
running 24 hours a day.

But perhaps the most illuminating
tidbit is a quote from Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich: "We don't ever
finish a film. I could keep on making it better. We're just forced to
release it."

This ethos of constant revision and
incremental perfectionism, I think, is what most clearly characterizes
Pixar's work. It's a luxury unique to animation, though one of which
few animators take comparable advantage. Live-action filmmakers are
essentially slaves to a shooting schedule. They go in with a script,
storyboards, etc., and come out, several weeks or a few months later,
with the footage they will assemble into a motion picture. Once the
sets are broken down and the cast-members scatter to their subsequent
projects, that's pretty much that, barring a relatively rare, extremely
costly re-shoot. Any subsequent "eurekas!" on the part of the
filmmakers are likely to be unrealized.

That's not the
case for the Pixar folks, however. Unlike some animators, they don't
generally assemble their vocal casts to work together, so they have the
flexibility to go through multiple iterations of writing and
performance. As Pete Docter (who directed Up and Monsters, Inc.) described the process to me:

Generally,
as you probably know, we write the film, and the actor signs on. We
record for three or four hours one day. We fly back to northern
California. And we, for four or five months, sit and rewrite stuff.
Then we fly down again, we do these short little bursts of recording,
and then we go off and we rewrite, re-edit, and recut. Rewrite,
re-edit, recut.

I remember talking to Billy Crystal
at the end of Monsters, Inc. He was starting to look at us like, "This
has all the telltale signs of a disaster," because live-action stars
are used to being done in six months. We're working two years. And then
we're coming down on a given day and handing them the stuff that we've
been rewriting and rewriting. And they're like, "What is this now?"
They really have to trust us to explain, "Ok. Now this scene has
changed in this way. You're now standing outside. You're yelling up to
him." Or whatever....

Animation is kind of like making a
movie in slow motion. Whereas on most live action sets you'd be like,
"Snap, snap, snap--come on we have 15 minutes to get all the rest of
the shots in," and then the whole set is struck, and you're screwed if
you think up another great idea because too bad, the actors have gone
off, the set's gone--we've got three years to craft and add and tie
things together. And that is key, I think, to what we do.

Rewrite,
re-edit, recut. Rewrite, re-edit, recut. Will the formula work again
for Toy Story 3? Bet against it if you will, but recognize that you're
betting against history.

About the Author

Christopher Orr is a senior editor and the principal film critic at The Atlantic. He has written on movies for The New Republic, LA Weekly, Salon, and The New York Sun, and has worked as an editor for numerous publications.

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